Using icons to organize a display and giving a user the appearance of an electronic desktop first appeared at Xerox Parc in the late 70's. Early attempts to commercialize a desktop motif were unsuccessful. However, an implementation is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,060,135, "Apparatus for Manipulating Documents in a Data Processing System Utilizing Reduced Images of Sheets of Information Which Are Movable." More recently, the IBM OS/2 Workplace Shell desktop motif provides icon manipulation. For example, users can drag a document icon, representing a letter, and drop it on the shredder icon to delete the document.
Other examples of icon manipulation include, U.S. Pat. No. 5,021,976 entitled, "Method and System for Generating Dynamic Interactive Visual Representations of Information Structures Within a Computer," which discloses a knowledge based system that links various mathematical relationships with icons on a graphical display. Visual features of the display assume various conditions (change of color/size) in accordance with the mathematical relationships.
However, none of the prior art techniques provide a method for easily and flexibly manipulating the information in an icon from one form to another in accordance with the subject invention.